Contact
by Meruhen Wind
Summary: Hinata turns around to where the noise is, spine all chills as she spots a sickly-looking boy her own age staring at her so intensely she doubts he's even looking at her at all, eyes a blood-red color. Still-somewhat-ninja AU, eventual Sasuhina.
1. Chapter 1

At age eight, Uchiha Sasuke lost his clan.

It wasn't anything as unfortunate as a compound fire or anything as bloody as a clan massacre.

It was much more simple, much more tragic: He was disowned.

You don't deserve to be a Uchiha, his brother had told him, phrasing it much more clearly than his parents had. Not when you're this weak. Don't dare claim our name when you can't even activate the Sharingan.

At age eight, Uchiha Sasuke was no longer Uchiha Sasuke.

Just Sasuke. Simply because he couldn't change his eye color.

-

At age eight, Hyuuga Hinata was not Hyuuga Hinata.

She was Kurenai Hinata, had been Kurenai Hinata for quite some time ever since her father decided she was not fit to be an heir and had simply shifted her along to somebody else in private.

Hyuuga Hinata was declared dead exactly a month after the exchange had taken place, and Kurenai Hinata, daughter of the young and widowed Kurenai Yuhi, was all that was left.

-

At age ten, Sasuke had gotten used to wandering around villages, more or less ignoring the mess of the military wars that plagued each one.

He trained relentlessly, could hunt and fend for himself remarkably well. He was strong, stronger than any ten-year-old (that didn't happen to be his genius brother) had any right to be.

Only, looking at the mirror, Sasuke knew what awaited him.

A dark-eyed boy whose name was Sasuke and never, never Uchiha.

-

Hyuuga Hinata had been shut indoors all her life, been shushed by countless branch-house servants and been hugged too little to develop much of a personality. Few knew what she had looked like; even fewer cared.

Ten year old Kurenai Hinata was unexpectedly shy in contrast to her mother. People often told her she was pretty, but it was a shame she had ordinary brown eyes instead of her mother's startlingly beautiful red ones.

When Kurenai overheard these comments, she only glanced at Hinata's dejected back and whispered not to worry, she looked just as beautiful as her (real) mother.

-

At twelve years old, Sasuke knew too much of the world.

Still wandering from village to village, he saw the world (as he used to know it, he distantly thinks) crumble into the misery he inhabits now.

He's not as weak as to think it's because he's lonely or because _his_ life is messed up.

No, he frowns, it's because although he was used to the military wars before, he can't help but get a sickening feeling in his stomach because of the civil uprisings that have started, because of the random families—innocent families—persecuted within each new town he visits.

As far as he knows, the only thing these victims have in common are unusual ninja techniques.

Somewhere inside him, an eight year old's voice says it's not fair.

He shushes it, of course, telling it it's weak for trying to get involved.

He refuses to answer, however, when it asks him if he isn't scared as well.

-

At twelve, Kurenai Hinata was an innocent snowflake in the heartless winter of the world.

Her mother (had she ever had another?) was kind to her, as was the rest of Konoha.

They were a peaceful village, except for the little incident that had apparently happened all the way back before either Hyuuga Hinata or Kurenai Hinata were born.

Kurenai Hinata knew nothing of civil war and little of prejudiced hate—only what she could see of mistrust and dislike in the villagers' eyes, when they looked at the one boy, the one everyone hated and she had grown to watch.

Why do they hate him? she had asked her mother day after day after day until she yielded. Her mother had seen a lot of the world, Hinata reasoned. She should know why.

Because he's different. He has power they can't obtain or control, her mother had finally said. Some people even want to kill him for that.

And to Hinata's confusion, Kurenai held her to her closely, worry shaking her mother's body.

-

By age fourteen, Sasuke no longer wanders from village to village.

He lives in the forests now, not depending on anyone's kindness, not asking for anyone's approval.

He is weak in nobody's eyes except his own, and he wouldn't have it any other way.

It's because he hates people, he tells himself, because everyone is bothersome and stupid and corrupt. Not because what he's seen has become so disgusting and meaningless and _corrupt_ that he doesn't want to put the pieces together, doesn't want the reality of what has happened—what will probably happen—to sink in.

Absentmindedly, almost brokenly, Sasuke lives in the forest and waits for red eyes.

-

By age fourteen, Kurenai Hinata has been acting as a medical-nin outside of Konoha for over a year.

She sees her mother only on weekends now, trying to stretch herself to meet the demands of the civil wars, the result of angry civilians and vengeful shinobi and corrupt leaders and self-interested ninja clans. Not everyone, she's learned, has had it as good as Konoha.

She is a good shinobi, everyone tells her, the type that would never harm an innocent person, even if she is a little weak-willed now and then. The type that would never break a rule. _Honest_.

She's broken a rule before, she's breaking one now, she wants to tell them. She shouldn't be healing the bodies she occasionally stumbles on, nearly mangled, too wounded bodies with almost broken eyes that belong to not-so-innocent ninja clan members with bloodline jutsus like her own clan surely must have.

Hinata heals them anyway, leaves them in a secret place—she's always been good at finding places no one else can see, for some reason. They won't notice, she tells herself.

After all, who could keep track of four or five children?

-

At age sixteen, Sasuke can no longer keep himself from putting the pieces together.

The laws ordering the execution (_massacre, large-scale murder_) of all clans with Kekkai Genkai reach even his ears, and he knows Konoha, as little as he remembers about it, will probably be no exception.

He is much too weak to return even now, he knows—pathetically weak, abnormally so. But out of sixteen years of life, he's only lived eight of them as a Uchiha.

He figures he's more or less earned the right to die as one.

He heads to Konoha, determined to know whether at least that much will be granted.

He reaches Konoha and finds out he's too late to even get an answer—too undeserving for fate to award him one.

At age sixteen, Sasuke is once more an Uchiha, eyes the color of his family's blood, tomoes swirling in confusion and wrath.

At age sixteen, eight years too late, Uchiha Sasuke gets his Sharingan. In a strange twist of fate, he finds he can't remove it at all.

-

At age sixteen, Kurenai Hinata has realized she cannot put the pieces together when it matters.

Out of the twenty wounded she's found so far, only three survived. The laws against them are harsh, and they have no freedom to live the life Hinata thoughtlessly preserved for them.

They are grateful of course (one has even been strong enough to leave), but she can't help but wish that she was stronger. Her inability to do anything but watch them suffer is almost too hard to bear.

She should be suffering alongside them, but she can't.  
Fate has judged her too weak and cushioned her with the life she lives now. Or so she thinks, until she sees Naruto and hears his speech before taking down a Jounin named Neji with long hair and grey eyes.

At age sixteen, Kurenai Hinata finds her ninja way.

-

It is shortly after this that, at age sixteen, still in Konoha, Uchiha Sasuke and Kurenai Hinata meet for the first time.

* * *

Author's Note: So yeah. Wrote this while somewhat sleepy in the wee hours of the night. Feel free to let me know if the plot is nonsense, if you have difficulty following my muddled writing, or if, against all odds, you happen to like this little plot bunny. =P I'm in that not-too-confident, dusty-writing skills mindset right now, so knowing this doesn't suck (or hearing how it could suck less) would really be helpful. :D

Anyway, thanks for reading this far? For those of you still hopeful on seeing me update my other stuff, I swear I'm working on it. :)


	2. Chapter 2

It has been eighteen hours since Uchiha Sasuke has first activated his Sharingan. It has taken him twelve of those hours to realize he hasn't turned it off.

It takes two more hours for him to realize he probably _should_ turn it off. For fifty-nine minutes he tries to calm down, to back away from the surge of power that his (too late) genetic talent gives him, but realizes before the hour's up that he should only be trying to turn it off if he wants to conserve chakra, not be knocked unconscious, not develop complete energy exhaustion, _not_ die.

Uchiha Sasuke spends the next three hours staring at his family's remains, savagely strewn all over the place, gaunt, decaying faces incompatible with an eight-year-old's memory.

Fully competent, respectfully-powerful Uchihas apparently didn't deserve a burial, ceremonial cremation—any sort of dignified death.

Sasuke figured, staring at one female's face until he could vaguely make out the remnants of his mother's characteristic furrowed brow, he didn't deserve one either.

By the eighteenth hour, Uchiha Sasuke hears the crackle and thump of approaching footsteps, and is much too gone to care.

---

It has been eighteen hours since Kurenai Hinata has returned to Konoha from a month-long trip to Water country with a sinking feeling in her stomach. Things were bad before she left and she doesn't expect them to be any better. The hatred for bloodline clans in Konoha has always been limited, fortunately, mainly because there was only one remaining bloodline clan even _in_ Konoha, and the Uchihas, she thinks, are good people.

It takes three hours to submit her team report, waiting in line for five or six other young-generation teams to finish. Shino and she take it well, accustomed to patience, and she stifles a smile as Kiba squirms in his seat, complaining that it seems like Konoha just wanted everyone twenty and under out of town.

Hinata gets home exhausted, falling asleep for a blissful if rather alarming twelve hours.

Having just come back from a long mission, Hinata meets up with her friends and former classmates at Ichimaru's later on, helplessly trying to make sense of Choji's chip-rating system and sneaking shy looks at Naruto before she latches on to two older fellow customer's conversation.

"_Oh, you mean the Uchiha affair?"_

"_Ugly business. Hate what happened, but what can you do? Traitors, the lot of 'em."_

By the seventeenth hour, Kurenai Hinata learns that the Uchihas aren't good people. They _were _good people. By the seventeenth hour, Hinata understands the grim truth behind Kiba's earlier, off-hand guess.

Adept at white lies and a master in excusing herself, Kurenai Hinata manages to reach the Uchiha compound to look for what survivors there may be by the eighteenth hour.

---

Uchiha Sasuke has more or less resigned himself to—has even begun to anticipate—meeting the hateful owner of these rushing footsteps. Had they come to offer one last stab, one last loot, one last decisive, finish-it-all kill?

He hoped so.

He sees instead, however, a pale slip of a female, dark-eyed and in medic-nin gard, the first living person he's really seen in four years. The first person he's seen, breathing the way his mother must have breathed once, blinking the way his father must have blinked once, _living _the way his family must have lived once and he finds himself staggering forward, leaves crunching under his own feet, unable to stop staring.

---

Hinata turns around to where the noise is, spine all chills as she spots a sickly-looking boy her own age staring at her so intensely she doubts he's even looking at _her_ at all.

His eyes are a blood-red color that ought to be familiar, ought to be comforting and soft like her mother's instead of so dark and deathly and _damned_. She doesn't know why until he steps closer and she sees a tomoe whirling. _An Uchiha_.

She holds her breath, wondering whether he'll live long enough to drag back to the secret spot and save—whether he wants to live long enough, whether he'll let himself be saved.

It is a question she always asks herself now, having seen so many seemingly curable and yet certainly inevitable deaths.

"Uchiha-san. Hello," she says finally, because she knows she can't handle the foreign silence anymore.

His eyes seem to explode in a crimson supernova at hearing his family name and lock on—for the first time, really—at _her_. He approaches her shakily, legs markedly weak, and Hinata feels like it'll be the first time words tumble out of his mouth for quite some time.

"...hhh..." she hears him mumble back before he collapses from exhaustion of chakra.

---

The last thing Uchiha hears before he passes out is a Konoha village girl who can, surprisingly, say his clan's name without hate.

Had the eight-year-old in him been listening, he might have smiled.

---

Haku is unfazed when Hinata shows up in the middle of the night with an unconscious body. He's seen the situation before—has the privilege of being the _first_ unconscious body she's dragged back here, in fact—and knows better than to ask stupid questions. So he asks smart ones.

"What do you know about this one?" he asks quietly, taking the boy off of her somewhat exhausted hands.

"H-he's an Uchiha. You—you should have told me as soon as I got here," Hinata murmurs back. "About the Uchihas. I could have gotten to him earlie—"

"They've all been dead for two weeks," he replies, not unkindly. "I checked as soon as I could. He's not one of them. I've never seen him around Konoha before, and he doesn't have any marks. He can't be an Uchiha. Not a Konoha-affiliated one, anyway."

"I saw tomoe," Hinata insists. "And he needs help whether he has physical wounds or not. His chakra's horribly depleted."

There's no arguing with Hinata when it comes to saving people, and Haku's thankful that she of all people found him ninety-nine percent of the time. But Hinata is innocent as well as kind, gullible as well compassionate. Hinata doesn't worry about preserving her own life, and Haku has long made it his single purpose in life to protect it for her. So he finds himself asking one last question.

"You do know he might not be worth healing, right? A traitor who hid while his clan died?" _A person who might bite the hand that feeds him_, he adds mentally worriedly.

"He might be," Hinata agrees with a frown, peering down at the Uchiha's dark face, recalling how frozen and haunted and _lost_ it was. "He might be, but he isn't."

Silently, Haku retreats into the cave to fetch Hinata's stash of medicines and ointments. Hinata wants to use them on this stranger, and that's enough for him.

His single purpose in life is to give her what she wants. Without a doubt, traitor or not, he knows she wants to save this boy.

--

When Uchiha Sasuke wakes up a few hours later, his eyes are, for two minutes and thirty-one seconds, a dead coal.

* * *

Author's Note: Um...yeah. I'm guessing I'm incorrigibly one of those always-on-hiatus-authors that only updates when they're bored. .__. I'm sorry.

Although I've gotten really, really awesome months-old reviews from people that I just found until now. So instead of sending them all super-late review replies, I might as well just post 'em here.

**AestheticPhobia**, **Kurai Akuryou no Joou**, **Melony-kun**, **ClockRepair**, **kibagaaralover18**, **Ayesha**, and **chocolatte-delight**:

Wow. Just...wow. ***blushes* **Thank you for the wonderful reviews—it's always an honor to get complimented on style and character development. I love Hinata's character and find some interesting traits in Sasuke's, so I'm glad to know some of those aspects were brought out. :) To those of you who asked me to update...I, uh, updated. (Better obscenely late than never, right? XD)

My apologies for the rather late (and short) reply, but to summarize in juvenile and uncomplicated emoticon-speak, your reviews made me :) .

-MW

Reviews as always, are appreciated. Feel free to de/constructively criticize, comment, extort for updates, or be "aslkdjfoihafdldkf, why Haku?" like my beta-reading classmate. :P


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